Then No One Can Have Her by Caitlin Rother Page B

asked.
    â€œOr on the trail behind the property?” Huante chimed in.
    â€œI haven’t been there.”
    The detectives told Steve that although they’d initially thought Carol might have accidentally fallen and hit her head, other evidence had now contradicted that theory. They told him they’d found blood in the house and, noting Steve’s bleeding scratches, gave him a chance to admit that he’d been there. They were going to serve a search warrant and collect blood, fingerprints and DNA samples, they said, and they would eventually find out anyway.
    â€œI’m happy to give you blood, saliva,” Steve said, “anything you need.... I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t do that.... What do you need from me? I mean, so now I get an attorney?”
    â€œThere’s nothing in there at all that’s going to tie you to this at all?”
    â€œThere is nothing that I’m aware of, ’cause I know what I was doing,” Steve replied in yet another curious answer.
    Brown and Huante tried to give Steve another chance to confess. “Now would be the time to say, ‘You know what? I went over and we argued, and she threw this at me and I got upset, and I—’”
    But Steve remained firm. “No,” he said. “I was not there.”
    Told Jake’s story that Steve had mentioned going riding on the trail around the fitness center, Steve said that was wrong, he’d never said such a thing. Asked to go over the information again about the trail he had taken off Love Lane, given its close proximity to the murder scene, Steve said, “Wish I’d chosen a different trail.”
    â€œI wish you had chosen a different trail also,” Brown said.
    â€œOf course if I had done it, I probably would have chosen something—I wouldn’t have chosen to be right near the scene of what sounds like [it] may be a crime.”
    Steve asked why the detectives initially thought Carol had died from a fall. Brown told him that at first the ladder’s position made it look as if she’d fallen from it, and that all the other stuff in the room had come “tumbling down.” But the blood patterns and the position of Carol’s body did not fit with that theory.
    â€œThere’s blood in the room and, like I said, a very traumatic injury to her head. Very traumatic . . . It looks like something was possibly covered up after the fact.”

    During one of the breaks during that long night of questioning, Steve called his divorce attorney, Anna Young, and asked her to come down to the station. Young showed up and stayed with Steve until the search warrants had been written and executed. But knowing she did not have the experience necessary to defend a homicide suspect, Young referred him to criminal defense attorney John Sears.
    Sears, in turn, called in private investigator Rich Robertson, a former investigative journalist and editor at the Arizona Republic, who had edited three separate stories that were Pulitzer Prize finalists.
    Steve’s sister Susan DeMocker was subsequently brought in as Sears’s legal assistant for a time, which kept costs down and also allowed her to brief Steve’s parents on the case regularly.
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    Outside Steve’s interview room, Huante and Brown conferred.
    â€œHe thinks he’s smart,” Huante said. “That gouge he has on his leg—”
    â€œA barbed-wire fence,” Brown added.
    â€œWe got to check that area really good,” Huante said, adding that as they’d already told Charlotte that “there were inconsistencies with her father’s story and we’re going to be doing a search on the house.”
    That’s when they learned that Renee Girard had already arrived at Steve’s condo—before the deputy who had been sent there to secure it and keep people from entering and moving or discarding evidence. In fact, one of the deputies noted, Renee had